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Editorial Overview
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Editorial Overview The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (CPPBS) will, when completed, include critically edited texts of all the poems that Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) released for circulation (whether to friends or to the reading public at large) and diplomatic renderings of his uncompleted and fragmentary poetry.1 The completed and released poems appear in the order and within the volumes and other groupings in which PBS released them to their intended audiences, whereas the poetic fragments that he never released appear either as “Supplements” to related poems that he did release or in groupings based on the draft manuscripts (MSS) in which they survive. Because we shall include more poems and fragments than have hitherto appeared in any single edition, as well as more extensive commentaries and collations than have previously been attempted, it seems likely, at this point, that CPPBS will require at least half a dozen volumes comparable in size to this one, or a smaller number of larger volumes. As we explain below, at this time scholars and students of PBS require a comprehensive edition that recovers the historical status of all of his poetic texts. We attempt this recovery by several means. First, we distinguish between the completed poems in which PBS conveyed his thoughts and feelings in art that he deemed worthy of being shown to his contemporaries and the other drafts and fragmentary efforts that he discarded, withheld from public view, or left unfinished at his death. Second, we retain both the sequential order of release and the internal arrangement of PBS’s poetic volumes, to reveal the harmonies (and dissonances) of their interrelationships and of his poetic development. Third, the collations both the primary variants at the foot of the text page and the Historical Collations at the back of the book provide a detailed record of changes during the composition and transmission of each poem, showing how our Text of a poem (always capitalized as Text to distinguish it from other texts) relates both to its authoritative copy-text and the texts derived by other editors. Fourth, to foster historical understanding of individual poems and the larger units within which they are grouped, our Commentaries situate PBS’s works within their biographical origins, sociopolitical ambiences, and literary traditions, both ideological and generic. Finally, these Commentaries allude to the reception of each poem or fragment and to its cultural xix development in subsequent textual, literary, and intellectual history. In short, we try to record the inseminating events and influences that led PBS to compose and arrange his poems, his struggle to shape and publish or otherwise circulate them to his intended audience, the reactions to his poems by their early readers and reviewers, their publication and transmission by Mary W. Shelley (MWS) and subsequent editors, and (to a lesser extent) responses to them by writers, critics, and thinkers amid the social and intellectual changes that have both reflected and shaped the reactions of other readers during the nearly two centuries since PBS set them afloat, like his beloved paper boats, upon the stream of Time. Contents of CPPBS The first three volumes of this edition will contain at least the earliest released poems until his departure with MWS for Italy in April 1818, plus the contemporaneous poetic MSS that PBS never developed or published. In addition, Volume I presents whatever is known about lost works and the texts of some of the early poems that have been attributed to PBS on less than convincing grounds. Beyond the poems in The Esdaile Notebook and Queen Mab, Volumes II and III will include the poems published in the Alastor volume; those written during the summer at Geneva and released during the next year notably Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Laon and Cythna, and the Rosalind and Helen volume with their related supplements and uncompleted fragments from the Bodleian notebooks in which PBS drafted them; and shorter poems that PBS released to friends during the same period. The remaining volumes will be devoted to the mature poems and unreleased fragments of the Italian period, arranged according to the general historical principles that we discuss in the pages that follow. Although PBS released some fragmentary poetry in letters to his friends, there survive few rough-draft notebooks or MSS of unreleased poems or discarded fragments from the period covered by the early volumes of CPPBS that is, his childhood, youth, and years with Harriet Westbrook Shelley. We shall, of course...